Exposed by a brave whistleblower: How our justice system frees convicted killers to go out and murder again

There is omerta within the criminal justice system: it seeks to disguise from the public the extent to which murders have been committed as a result of its own policies.

Unlike the Mafia, these murders — or other crimes of extreme violence — are not their own deliberate handiwork. But they are still the direct consequence of state policy — and what’s more, the state knows that they are.

That conspiracy of silence by insiders has now been broken — by someone who has spent his entire career within the criminal justice system, first as a probation officer and then as a criminal intelligence analyst within the National Crime Agency.

his name is David Fraser. he is the author of Licence To Kill: Britain’s Surrender To Violence, which has just been published by The Book Guild.

It is an insider’s explanation of what the Mail, in recent days, has once again exposed: the way what is laughably referred to as our justice system repeatedly fails to impose custodial terms on habitual violent offenders — with the inevitable results.

Contempt

Last year, violent crime surged by over 20 per cent, with 1.5 million such offences recorded by the police, the most since the present system of crime reporting began 15 years ago.

David Fraser’s professional experience goes much further back — and his disillusionment, too.

As he writes: ‘In 1967, I joined the probation service with the then commonly-held expectation that offenders, given help and support, could be persuaded to lead the straight life. It soon became obvious that this was a forlorn hope. The vast majority of the criminals on our caseloads never gave up crime, and treated the courts’ leniency with contempt.

‘The evidence of the failure of probation supervision, and other forms of lenient sentencing, has been recorded and stored by the government, but assiduously ignored . . . The criminals on our books were treating their periods on probation as a licence to offend and committed violence and mayhem wherever and whenever they liked. But few dared to speak up about this.’

That sense of impunity is also based on the belief that they won’t be caught.

As Fraser points out, the nature of modern policing gives them good reason: ‘A report by the police inspectorate revealed that overall they spend 22 per cent of their time on “support functions”, while for 47 per cent of their time they were policing roads and carrying out community work. Only 31 per cent of their time was spent dealing with criminals, of which only 13 per cent was devoted to investigating crime.’

The consequence of reducing crime investigation to a small fraction of the police’s day-to-day work is obvious: last year, in only 4 per cent of robberies were the criminals concerned detected and convicted, less than half the rate of only a few years ago. And as the Civitas thinktank revealed last year, criminal insouciance can only be increased by the fact that just a third of those convicted of violent crimes are given custodial sentences.

David Green, the director of Civitas, pointed out in the Mail last week: ‘Incredibly, even half of those with 11 to 14 convictions avoided a prison term.’

Yes, our prisons are already crowded. But the proper response to such a situation can’t be to find ever more reasons not to send repeat violent offenders to jail. This is to treat the prison estate like a hotel business: sorry, we’d like to give you a room, but we’re full up. Actually, a good hotel business would see this as a reason to invest in more capacity, rather than turn customers away: the same should apply to our prison estate.

In fact, the longer the prison sentence, the less the reoffending rate.

As Fraser notes, there is a reoffending rate of 60 per cent among those who serve sentences of less than a year, 39 per cent for those sentenced to between one and two years, 34 per cent for two to four years, 25 per cent for ten years and 14 per cent reoffending by those who have served terms of ten years or more.

Violent

Given that the longer sentences would be served by more dedicated and dangerous criminals, this is striking: it demonstrates the deterrent effect of tougher sentencing.

And in turn, this suggests that while tougher sentencing would initially demand an expansion of the prison estate (and therefore public expenditure), it would, in the longer term, lead to a drop in violent crime and therefore reduce the pressure on jail space. Most importantly, it would protect the public, which is the essential purpose of the criminal justice system.

Fraser’s recommendation is for an introduction of a ‘two-strikes’ system, under which, for example, those convicted of attempted murder who had already served time for earlier crimes of violence against the person, would be sentenced to life without prospect of parole.

This would have saved the life of my wife’s cousin, John Monckton. In 2005, he was stabbed to death — and his wife terribly wounded — by Damien hanson, only months after he had been released having served just six years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder (with a machete). hanson had a record of previous violent offences. Unbelievably, the parole board which took the decision to release hanson designated him in the lowest category of danger to the public, even though it had assessed him as having a ‘91 per cent probability of reoffending’. Fraser discusses this case. But his book went to press too early to record the conclusion of a trial earlier this year, which more than any other justifies his demand that a life sentence for murder should mean just that (the average prison term actually served for murder is 16 years).

In March, two men were convicted in Newcastle Crown Court of the murder of a 29-year-old mother of two, Quyen Ngoc Nguyen. In a pre-meditated crime of unimaginable depravity, Stephen Unwin and William McFall robbed, raped and bludgeoned this 5ft-tall nail bar manager.

They dumped her — possibly still alive — in her own car, which they then set alight. They posed for ghoulish selfies at the scene.

Bizarre

Both men were already convicted killers, released as a result of parole board hearings.

McFall, now 51, had been freed after serving 13 years for battering to death with a hammer an 86-year- old woman whose home he had burgled.

Unwin, ten years younger, had been released after serving 14 years of a ‘life sentence’ for stabbing to death a 73-yearold retired pharmacist in the course of a burglary — on Christmas Day, 1998. Unwin had sought to cover up his tracks by setting fire to his victim’s bungalow.

he was released in 2012, because the parole board had believed his claim to feel ‘deep remorse’.

In fact, there is no parole board on earth which can know if someone is truly remorseful. They can only know if a murderer says he is remorseful; and as it is obligatory to be penitent for parole to be considered, it is obvious to even the stupidest criminal that he should declare himself to be so.

Parole boards should not even have to make such decisions about murderers.

And if life meant life, they wouldn’t be put in such a position — nor would probation officers be required to add such cases to their already impossible task of monitoring far too many released serious criminals.

As a retired judge, Lindsay Burn, observed when the parole board made a bizarre decision earlier this year to authorise the release of the multiple rapist Derek Worboys (this so- called Black Cab rapist, too, had expressed ‘deep regret’): ‘I had a case in which I sentenced a rapist for imprisonment for public protection, and he was released and committed exactly the same offence afterwards. his risk clearly could not be managed. We should not pretend the public are safe when they are not.’ exactly so. We should be grateful to those, such as Lindsay Burn and David Fraser, who reveal the way the system betrays the public it claims to protect.

But if the politicians do not listen and act, then they are also betraying these courageous whistleblowers.